Food is a big deal

Food glorious food!  There's nothing quite like food. 

Food is sustenance.  We eat to live.  We nourish our bodies.  Some say we crave that which we need. 

Food is pleasure.  We live to eat.  It tastes good.  We could talk about that all day long.  We remember food from our childhood. Mom's egg rolls or her homemade stuffing and gravy.  Sometimes food just hits the spot.  The perfect hamburger.  An ice cream sundae.  Linguini with white clam sauce.  Caviar.  French fries.  Pad thai.  I digress.

Food is guilt.  We indulge, binge and overeat.  Food is what we should eat... vegetables, fiber, whole grains.  We may not like our relationship with food.  Maybe we think about food too much.

Food is social.  Holidays.  Family traditions.  Special celebrations.  BBQs.  Brunch.  High tea.  We  welcome, woo and impress with food.  We negotiate and conduct business.  When we break bread with someone, it's an important gesture.  It can be intimate.  We eat with people we like.

Food rewards and compensates.  We console ourselves after a tough day.  We acknowledge a milestone, a big win.  We eat as a substitute for love or success.

Food controls.  We eat to push others away.  We assert control over our environment by restricting what we eat.  Our neuroses and hang-ups become apparent in our relationship with food.

Food is medicine.  Food heals.  We also self-medicate with food... to give us energy, make us happy, fill an emotional or psychological need. 

Food is spiritual.  Fasting for religious or spiritual reasons is a custom that pre-dates written history.  It aid sin prayer and meditation and has been found to support health and healing.  We are thankful when we eat. Even if we have never experienced true, sustained hunger, we can imagine it and know it is a terrible thing. 

Change your food, change your life

Aside from breathing, eating is quite possibly the most important thing we do every day.  With every bite we put in our mouths, we support or detract from health.   If you're sick, food can make us well.  If we eat badly, food can make us sick.  When we eat consciously, we think about our world differently.  We consider the environment, the food chain, the humane treatment of livestock and the ethics of modern food technology.  Food changes everything.  Change your food, change your life.

For anyone who wants to start or stay on a path of health, recovery and wellness, food is a foundational building block.  There's no getting around it... we have to tackle the subject of food.  And herein lies the rub. We don't want to.  Tell us to do anything else.  We'll swallow pills, rub ointment, take IVs, wear sensors, use headphones, manipulate fascia, sit in heat and cold and pressurized oxygen.  We'll subject ourselves to nearly any reasonable or plausible therapy.  But please, not the food. 

Find support for your goals

Habits are powerful.  And food habits are among the most ingrained and intractable of all.  The irony of course is that food is an area in which we logically shouldn't need support.  Read some books, pull out the pots and pans, experiment.  Intuitively, it's pretty easy to make the leap and quickly assess the changes  we want to make.  But practically speaking, it's another matter.  For most of us, we may as well have been asked to scale Mount Everest.  It doesn't happen.

There are many ways you can get support and not all of them cost a lot of money.  There are books, movies,  books on tape and websites, more than you can possibly imagine.  There are support groups, both online and in our community.  There are cooking classes, nutrition schools, conferences, workshops and webinars.  And then there's personalized help.  You can hire a nutritional counselor to help keep you on track.  Or you can hire a personal chef to make it happen in your kitchen. 

In this section on food, you'll learn more about the powerful concepts of integrative nutrition.  We'll discuss the role of dietary interventions for tactical, short-term issues.  We'll review both new and traditional dietary philosophies for long-term, sustainable eating.  I offer a special section on the subject of gluten.  And finally, we talk about cooking support.  Because that's where the rubber meets the road.  We all eat.  Someone prepared the food.  Until that someone is you, or someone you can explicitly direct, it will be very difficult to get a handle on the changes you want to make for health.